Book Image

Mastering Malware Analysis - Second Edition

By : Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet
5 (2)
Book Image

Mastering Malware Analysis - Second Edition

5 (2)
By: Alexey Kleymenov, Amr Thabet

Overview of this book

New and developing technologies inevitably bring new types of malware with them, creating a huge demand for IT professionals that can keep malware at bay. With the help of this updated second edition of Mastering Malware Analysis, you’ll be able to add valuable reverse-engineering skills to your CV and learn how to protect organizations in the most efficient way. This book will familiarize you with multiple universal patterns behind different malicious software types and teach you how to analyze them using a variety of approaches. You'll learn how to examine malware code and determine the damage it can possibly cause to systems, along with ensuring that the right prevention or remediation steps are followed. As you cover all aspects of malware analysis for Windows, Linux, macOS, and mobile platforms in detail, you’ll also get to grips with obfuscation, anti-debugging, and other advanced anti-reverse-engineering techniques. The skills you acquire in this cybersecurity book will help you deal with all types of modern malware, strengthen your defenses, and prevent or promptly mitigate breaches regardless of the platforms involved. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to efficiently analyze samples, investigate suspicious activity, and build innovative solutions to handle malware incidents.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Part 1 Fundamental Theory
4
Part 2 Diving Deep into Windows Malware
10
Part 3 Examining Cross-Platform and Bytecode-Based Malware
14
Part 4 Looking into IoT and Other Platforms

Exploring ARM assembly

Most of you are probably more familiar with the x86 architecture, which implements the CISC design. So, you may be wondering, why do we need something else? The main advantage of RISC architectures is that the processors that implement them generally require fewer transistors, which eventually makes them more energy and heat-efficient and reduces the associated manufacturing costs, making them a better choice for portable devices. We have started our introduction to RISC architectures with ARM for a good reason – at the time of writing, this is the most widely used architecture in the world.

The explanation is simple – processors that implement it can be found on multiple mobile devices and appliances such as phones, video game consoles, or digital cameras, heavily outnumbering PCs. For this reason, multiple IoT malware families and mobile malware that target Android and iOS platforms have payloads for the ARM architecture; an example can be...